As industrial plants, fluid utilization facilities that run or perform production using fluids such as steam and gas other than steam (air or various gas fuels including propane gas and methane gas) are common and in wide use. For example, in a steam utilization facility, which is a kind of such fluid utilization facility, drain water, which is a condensate, is produced from steam as a result of running the steam utilization facility. Therefore, in order to remove this drain water from steam pipes, a large number of steam traps are arranged in a dispersed manner on the steam pipes in the steam utilization facility. If an abnormality occurs in these steam traps as in the case where steam leaks or drain water is not appropriately discharged, energy loss occurs, and moreover, the running efficiency in the steam utilization facility decreases, resulting in considerable losses. For this reason, in order to manage the steam utilization facility, the state of steam traps that are arranged in a dispersed manner on the steam pipes in the steam utilization facility is monitored.
Conventionally, as a method for monitoring individual steam traps in the steam utilization facility, a method has been proposed in which steam trap monitoring devices that transmit data detected by a sensor to a computer are installed on respective steam traps, the data on the individual steam traps is collected into the computer from these steam trap monitoring devices, and the data is analyzed using the computer to monitor the state of the individual steam traps (e.g. see Patent Document 1).
Note that the above situation is not limited to steam utilization facilities but is common to fluid utilization facilities across the board, and the above conventional method is applicable to general fluid utilization facilities. In this case, the terms may be replaced with other appropriate terms. For example, “steam” may be replaced with various “fluids”, and “steam trap” may be replaced with “drain trap”.